In the cool night of childhood
I saw the heavenly glass
Through flecks in the dusty sky
Wandered in the vast, wild wood

Climbing in the walnut tree
Lolling on the dawn's dew grass
Cloud coverings shifting by
Prayer budding from out of me

I dozed unanswerable and free
Weary, glad, and wholly good.

Flush-faced, his broad chest full of might
In such mellow growth so slow and sure
Abides he like the yellow moon at night
Hung sidling by in silence evermore

A flame that struggles ‘gainst the cutting gale
Then hides inside so that its force conserves
Or rather like the wax that waits to melt
For light that burns until its last exhale

Oh Love of mine, who glows and warms
So softly that he almost can’t be felt.

Where, oh Heart, is the answer?
In man’s olive iris that pines
capsule of soulish vines stretching

by the water in that memory…
First pink touch: the long name,
Which you say is so
easy on the eye

In catching dim fair soft lights
blown in gloom’s silver odds

between two old pages or
News soaked in a gray ink drop bath:
The blending of war broken out on earth’s cheek
With the gossiping red margins and
Something eerie on the last page…

I step on it, walking straight.

In still mindfully begging
Oval windows on the church ramparts:
 Is it in the epoch
          Womanhood?
In the sore ******, in the sore slits
            Dribbling pollen of wounds of
            Nickings, gyps, slights, losses

Is it in a stasis
Forested with chocolate and sisters
Purpled bedtime music boxes
Dreaming or in the moment I
Stir my bland corners with song
            Not in victories banners cheering
            Hunched labor in running
            Something we get when winning

Is it in a process
That wrinkles like skin, then spots
            Or hangs over the path
            A great moss and changing
the wintery company of foliage and twig to
fire and blossom,
in the birth of death and growing?

is it in kissing or eating before praying
like guilt yellow as bruised pear hips
that melt to brown in your fingers

Should I see or hear or feel it
in the man himself, meat of his fine muscles,
his heart's voice, the buried hunger pang,
it speaks
or in his prayer's slow sadness,
black as the tomb's passage and
can you answer?

My love, I cannot write to you a word,
For any word requires a treatise true,
Each chapter, then, a jury for review,
Whose jurors must be scrupulously heard--

Each letter would be faulty in its sound,
And seem to need another or one less,
A clause to justify would just digress,
And never would the proper print be found--

To write to you a play descends to plot,
A choir, perchance, would make an honest show,
Yet shows are sharp when high and flat when low,
So base a stage cannot portray my thought.

In love, I must allow mere words to err,
And credit them for carrying us there.

I looked with the intent to hear his thoughts-
Both of us held used booklets.

"She symbolizes passivity," he,
in acquiescence, whispered.

My espionage, my love, won thusly:
Before his whisp'ring ceased,

Great passivity fell like a curtain
Between that sweet boy and me.

If ever you wanted me, pay no mind
To poetry I write or oaths I take
Nor bother with my look, for it is blind
And what I say will change with every wake.

Don't try me, with my patience cut in half-
My hands, no good for holding, cannot feel,
And every man that's loved me once will laugh
To think my palpability was real.

Give not a violet or a sweeter word
Than “No” to me or else I do not hear.
To tell me something true would be absurd,
Since virtue bids me nothing more than fear.

But do deny me everything I ask,
Then punish me for giving you the task.

How it fills!
That shapely, well-lettered word-
Tongue but forms itself upon it
And all about me rousts in imagination.
Love! O tiny swear of cream
Tall and titled, come out of me
My eyelashes, mouth, and knees all feel it
It rising up from under
Pull and bellow in the earshot
Drifts as a pool of air, balmy smoke
Yet I alone can hear it
Strung and short, it wafts a potent lap around me
Hanging, my head in a banal sink.

You must forgive
When nothing meant to do you wrong
And it did.
When the two backs
Back in at the party
To each other
The drinks don't spill,
No casual pain.
Even a nod is forgiveness.
When you fall in bed,
Out of love with yourself,
Private and sardonic
So hateful
Nobody heard you, and
You're all right.
A laugh, even is.
When you meant to do nothing wrong.
Like a new bird
Without an old bird looking,
Forego the fate leap.
No one’s watching.
When you allow the old ruins
To flee and burn
Say no harm has come.
Thread unwinding the nylons
Withering in your eyes
On a spying train
It’ll pass.
They will graciously turn away from you
Again,
You feel fine.
Though I know you sing
At night, in the back bathroom,
Washing your hands
Of black bile

It’s that my bedroom walls
Are two cupped hands, clammy
And cradling, how it feels inside
Of a sliced fish, pink sometimes
Too, like the gums lining eyes
Under a Spring sun
But they’re painted green,
The green of spotty mold florets
And planks with split ends
Shine like ironed dyed auburn hair
Molded in a cheap wax,
That never melts,
Though the desk lamp cheaply
Spotlights the thumbtacked
Rubric by the impotent light switch
And makes the doorknob warm
By association, it’s nice and still
So that I stay in here, developing
Absorbing phrases like “the
Activation of relational defenses”
Or ornamental gems from
The despondent Russian savants,
Even things that may be useless
(How to Clean Everything is turned,
binding back, bristles out, beneath
Popular Card Games, and I don’t
Own a deck of cards) that I still
Open and snack on in times
Of disorientation, and to go out
Would crumple the whole, delicate
Cocoon, the paper cloister, the
Draft that wafts around my hard and
Numb toes would escape
And I’d dry up like a defunct worm

We're supposed to care
in the pits of our hearts
and review in solemn
exactitude the magnitude
of little things we did
as kids

Try to recognize this
exsanguinating loss
and watch as what you were
is cast to disappear in past's
prolific mists

so vast they dwarf,
they drown us: caring as we are
in hearts' pits.

To not have felt yet, what a shame
Tiny child that opens dilated eyes
Without a wrinkle caused by sun
Or love from which the troubled child shies

Inarticulate, lolling tongue
And someday, a swear word or a French kiss
Pink glands gel in salivation
No earthly child denies the Self of this

Every now and then, the wind of a guilt sermon,
in passing stained glass or Mary-Janed feet in laced socks,
the prophetic hollers of my old fathers, their light,
a little like August, bad jokes, or cupboard dust,
lands on me in my way, and brings my thoughts
to the foot of my mother's bed. I see her little ash tray
her polished toes and limp, east-side San Jose hair lies
over a shoulder, in the ninth or tenth spring of my life,
inside the kitchen arch, the kitchen of flour hands,
potted thyme and mint in the ***** sill,
or the motor sauce garage, wherein dwells my Saint,
Brother of arms and courage and wine,
a warrior hero, young Rock of Ages,
at fiber glass snow beneath my bare child feet,
into the books and boys I loved like cheap fiction,
crack of candy jewels between my jaw and thrill-stressed eyes,
into the bedroom of my blasphemous best friend,
posters of starlet boys, eye make up, so many
dark, whispered nights in her sparkling world of
material life, a New York post card on her door and
stories that drove my strawberry heart mad with envy,
late night TV shows and songs that sang to lovers only,
lovers and sinners and people like me-
and then, I revel and miss, and into a valley,
my soul's glow dims and flicks, on and off
with real anger, I look down, and solemn, I know
that hope, I forged anew every Sunday again,
and resurrected contentment, faith, with folded hands
How sorely I miss the taste of swallowed church tears' salt
and the smell of a cherry switch,
and the itch and sweat of obedience,
and the stilled tremor of my legs in
white, hand-me-down tights,
my homemade Christ